Has anyone considered buying an Electric or Hybrid Car as a Toad? Or a Toad with Regenerative Braking so your Toads battery will charge when you tow it. Of course, you have to have a brake application system installed in your Toad for this to work. Based on Newtons Third Law my thinking on all of these is that the net result will be zero or negative when friction is taken into consideration.
An Electric Car or a Hybrid could be charged by connecting a charging circuit from your bus to your Toad.
Another solution would be to put a windmill on top of your car that generates power whist in motion.
However, as my mom always told me her law... "You don't get something for nothing."
How about using solar panels on your bus to charge your car whilst stationary or moving? There is an initial cash outlay, like all of these ideas, but in how many years/miles would the break-even point be crossed?
So what is the bottom line Physics, Math and Engineering majors? Will any of these system create more energy than are expending or will all of them be a wash, or more likely with friction, a loss?
What are your thoughts???
Buy a diesel toad and eliminate all the extra wiring, hardware, solar panels.
Slightly related enough to where I'll chime in.
I've have thought about an electrical KERS or regenerative braking system for our busses. Here is how it would work in my mind.
If you have the OTR AC removed you have the mounting points for the old compressor, it's begging for something to put in there.
You mount a motor / generator in there and the pulleys connected to the engine just like the old AC compressor. When the brake lights come on, it fips a relay to engage the generator which will put a load on the engine, assisting with braking. Now for a KERS type system, where you'd want to then run it in reverse, you'd want to dump the power into large super capacitors, which gets applied as you increase throttle. Or it could just provide help in charging the house batteries and nothing more.
I don't know anything about the specifics of it all, but if it was even 50% efficient, I'd say that's a solid win.
Although such a 'bolt-on' system is attractive I think the weak link (literally) in the concept is the idea of trying to transmit vehicle braking forces through the engine accessory belts.
Perhaps a better re-use of existing bus systems would be to re-wire a Telma retarder in a way that re-purposed the electricity it generated - or, on buses that don't have Telmas, I expect a clever person could find a way of spinning a turbine using the compressed gases created by a Jake brake.
Jeremy
Quote from: Jeremy on December 05, 2018, 02:47:24 PM
Perhaps a better re-use of existing bus systems would be to re-wire a Telma retarder in a way that re-purposed the electricity it generated . . .
Do Telmas actually produce electricity? Aren't they electromagnetic resistance, like the resistance units in some exercise bikes? Telmas require a hefty alternator. So saying, I wish I had a Telma - maybe I can find a used Focal for cheap
(Yeah, dream on).
John
Telmas cannot create electricity. All they are are electro magnets around a disc. In order to produce electricity, you'd have to electrify the disc someway-and that would require brushes, stator, regulators, etc-way too much money.
Using an electric/hybrid car to charge while pulling, your bus will use more fuel because of the drag. The best suggestion has already been said-get a Diesel powered towed. I tow my Mercedes 300 turbodiesel. Course, I had to get a driveline disconnect, but have had no problems. Good Luck, TomC
Neoneddy's idea has some merit. The one bus that this idea could work on is the Eagle. On the older models with the miter box on the rear with two driveshafts, the unused driveshaft for the A/C could drive the device that would put a load on to retard the engine. You guys can work out the details, but keep the cost down. It could make up the difference for the weak 2 cycle Jacob's Brakes. :o
Quote from: TomC on December 07, 2018, 08:33:33 AM
Telmas cannot create electricity. All they are are electro magnets around a disc. In order to produce electricity, you'd have to electrify the disc someway-and that would require brushes, stator, regulators, etc-way too much money.
Using an electric/hybrid car to charge while pulling, your bus will use more fuel because of the drag. The best suggestion has already been said-get a Diesel powered towed. I tow my Mercedes 300 turbodiesel. Course, I had to get a driveline disconnect, but have had no problems. Good Luck, TomC
Inducing an electric current requires either stationary coils and moving magnets or moving coils and stationary magnets. So you wouldn't 'electrify the disk' since that would be getting the principle of operation the wrong way around; the confusion perhaps comes from using the term 'electro magnets' and thinking that means that they are the magnets and the 'disk' therefore becomes the coil. In fact electro magnets themselves ARE coils, so the way you'd make the system work would be to re-engineer the central disk so that it carried magnets and moved them past those coils (and they'd be no need for brushes or any of that stuff)
I'm not suggesting trying to adapt a Telma like this is something anyone would ever want to attempt, just mentioning the principle as it's probably the closest way of emulating in a bus the way regenerative braking works on electric cars
Jeremy
I know very little about Telmas but in an alternator the armature current is varied to control the field winding output, which also varies the load on the pulley.
Jim
"Energy conversion losses" and "Perpetual Motion" come to mind...
If we're going to dream...
I'd be more interested in developing the methods to use the free electric car charging stations to re-charge the house bank during a discrete overnight parking lot stay...
Save money busnuts, don't spend it...
Happy coaching!
Buswarrior
Quote from: buswarrior on December 08, 2018, 07:59:11 AM
"Energy conversion losses" and "Perpetual Motion" come to mind...
If we're going to dream...
I'd be more interested in developing the methods to use the free electric car charging stations to re-charge the house bank during a discrete overnight parking lot stay...
Save money busnuts, don't spend it...
Happy coaching!
Buswarrior
You never know, put some "Tesla Experimental Vehicle" badges on the back of your bus and it might confuse people enough so you could plug-in to those charging points without anyone complaining.
I have a memory of an old pre-war black-and-white movie I saw once where the main character, who was a shady, quick-talking type (imagine Sid James from Hancock's Half Hour) who got fuel to run his car by parking under a streetlamp every night and connecting a hose to the light fitting - this being in the era when streets in London were still lit by gas lamps.
Jeremy
Wouldn't using regenerative braking require a substantial battery bank to store all the energy?
Quote from: kyle4501 on December 09, 2018, 01:57:49 PM
Wouldn't using regenerative braking require a substantial battery bank to store all the energy?
The intent would only be to charge the stock batteries in the Toad, no more than that.
...which under normal conditions will be at full charge?
Jim
The li-on batteries in an electric toad I assume, not the (always charged) lead-acid battery in a ICE toad
Jeremy
As far as how to transfer this power and braking to the system, my thought is only this. Belt driven alternators and A/C compressors put a large load on the engine and are belt driven. I was never thinking this would replace normal braking, but to assist and capture some of that energy.
https://youtu.be/n9fAnjgR8lA The Formula 1 KERS system is more what I'm thinking.
Quote from: Gary Hatt - Publisher BCM on December 09, 2018, 05:17:28 PM
The intent would only be to charge the stock batteries in the Toad, no more than that.
Based on my experience with a hybrid Honda Accord, I would expect the toad battery would be at full charge before you got to the bottom of the first decent sized hill.
I must say that if I had a big chunk of 'free' electricity available in my bus I'd be looking for ways of using it to assist the bus itself along the road. How much engine power & diesel do the compressor and alternator consume for example? Or the A/C system? Use that big chunk of electricity to power that stuff instead and you'd immediately get down the road more quickly and more cheaply. Then there are things like electric superchargers that'd get you down the road quicker still..
Jeremy
That's exactly what a KERS system would do. An extra boost on take offs or up a hill (assuming you charged the system down the previous hill)
But what sort of generator / motor would both do this and not burn up a belt or something and have enough HP to make a difference. My Onan 4.0 BFA generator has a coil that works like this, both as a motor and a generator.
There's a big community of people doing DIY electric car conversions and the individual components (traction motors etc) are readily available from on-line suppliers. The problem is how to integrate a motor into the existing drive train (rubber belts definitely not being the answer I'm sure), and how to control the motor, since the drive controllers are one of the trickiest and most expensive parts of a conversion.
On the other hand though, if you are using off-the-shelf EV parts then your regenerative braking questions answer themselves because the motors / drive controllers / battery management software have that capability built in.
Jeremy
As a point of interest, cogged drive belts are used in automotive applications in excess of 100 hp so I'm not sure it's as much of a limiting factor as you suspect. Big street bikes have been using them for decades both on the primary and secondary drives. I would expect the practical limit to be something over 200hp by now.
Jim
I have cogged belts on my FLH, but I am more interested on how I can turn on my headlights in the bus to slow down instead of using my Jakes!!
Yes those wide toothed belts are a different kettle-of-fish altogether and I don't doubt they could transmit a significant amount of power.
Since belt-driven superchargers use exactly that type of belt there must be off-the-shelf accessory pulleys available for them that could perhaps be bolted onto the front of a bus engine without too much difficulty, which would give you a starting-point for the type of supplementary-electric-power system we're talking about
Jeremy